Clustering or classification is a very fundamental task that may occur almost everywhere for the purpose of grouping. Optimal clustering is an example of very complicated combinatorial optimization problem and it is hard to develop a generally applicable optimal algorithm. In this paper we propose a general-purpose algorithm for the optimal clustering based on SA(simulated annealing). Among various iterative global optimization techniques imitating natural phenomena that have been proposed and utilized successfully for various combinatorial optimization problem, simulated annealing has its superiority because of its convergence property and simplicity. We first present a version of accelerated simulated annealing(ASA) and then we apply ASA to develop an efficient clustering algorithm. Application examples are also given.